An Béal Bocht

An Béal Bocht (The Poor Mouth) is a 1941 novel in Irish by Brian O'Nolan (better known by his pen name Flann O'Brien), published under the pseudonym "Myles na gCopaleen". It is regarded as one of the most important Irish-language novels of the twentieth century. An English translation by Patrick C. Power appeared in 1973. Stan Gebler Davies wrote: "The Poor Mouth is wildly funny, but there is at the same time always a sense of black evil. Only O'Brien's [sic] genius, of all the writers I can think of, was capable of that mixture of qualities."